Saturday, September 28, 2013

To understand why [the Republicans are willing to contemplate shutdown], I need to again refer back to something I posted more than two years ago, right after I was the first speaker at the first meeting of the House tea party caucus.

I was talking informally with a number of the members of Congress who had been there after the meeting ended. There was unanimous agreement among those members that the biggest thing the House GOP had done wrong during the 1995 and 1995-96 shutdowns was that it had given in to Bill Clinton too early. The GOP would have gotten a much better deal, they told me, if it had pushed harder and been willing to keep the government closed longer.

Pushing until the very, very last minute has been one of the mainstays of the House GOP's negotiating strategy on budget issues ever since . With one exception -- House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) unilaterally deciding nine days before the deadline to cut a deal with the White House to extend the reduction in the payroll tax -- every budget decision since 2011 has gone up to, and in some cases beyond, the deadline.

This is why no one should have been surprised when the House GOP announced earlier today that it will not simply accept the Senate-passed clear CR. even though there are less than three full days before the end of the fiscal year. It may still do that or, rather, the caucus may allow House Democrats and handful of Republicans to do that, but it will only happen at or just after Monday at midnight...and even that's not certain.

Anything else would have violated the tea party negotiating principle I was told in February 2011.

So what do they expect to get by pushing this to the very limit? Surely it isn't the Obamacare delay. That's just not going to happen. And it's hard to see that repealing the Medical device tax would be enough to justify all this drama. So what's the real bottom line?